The Urban and Social Fabric of Nuremberg from the 1940s onwards: a Spatio-temporal Analysis

As one of the most heavily bomb-damaged cities in Germany, with around 90% of its historic city centre destroyed, Nuremberg provides an excellent example to explore the urban and social transformation of a postwar city. We bring together heterogeneous and under-researched data sets and archival material from the postwar period and convert urban features depicted in historic maps and scanned documents into geospatial data that is analysed with a Geographical Information System (GIS). Building on Conzen’s historic-geographical approaches (1968), we combine morphological variables of townscape analysis and socioeconomic data to present three different transformations over time. First, we examine urban morphological change by comparing prewar and present-day building form units (building block typologies) to explore how the areas of postwar transformation relate to the prewar block typologies of the city. Secondly, we focus on land use units, comparing the prewar spatial land use distribution with present-day land use data. Thirdly, we explore these morphological variables in relation to other historic and present-day socioeconomic metrics to evaluate change in the social transformation of Nuremberg over time.  We demonstrate how postwar planning decisions made since the postwar period, enable a plan-based interpretation of the planning strategies to have guided postwar planning in Nuremberg, and provide a way of evaluating these in relation to the socioeconomic profile of the city today. Providing an alternative appraisal of postwar city transformation, this diachronic research offers insight into Nuremberg’s under-researched past, which is also of interest to planners and policy makers seeking to improve future cities.As one of the most heavily bomb-damaged cities in Germany, with around 90% of its historic city centre destroyed, Nuremberg provides an excellent example to explore the urban and social transformation of a postwar city. We bring together heterogeneous and under-researched data sets and archival material from the postwar period and convert urban features depicted in historic maps and scanned documents into geospatial data that is analysed with a Geographical Information System (GIS). Building on Conzen’s historic-geographical approaches (1968), we combine morphological variables of townscape analysis and socioeconomic data to present three different transformations over time. First, we examine urban morphological change by comparing prewar and present-day building form units (building block typologies) to explore how the areas of postwar transformation relate to the prewar block typologies of the city. Secondly, we focus on land use units, comparing the prewar spatial land use distribution with present-day land use data. Thirdly, we explore these morphological variables in relation to other historic and present-day socioeconomic metrics to evaluate change in the social transformation of Nuremberg over time.  We demonstrate how postwar planning decisions made since the postwar period, enable a plan-based interpretation of the planning strategies to have guided postwar planning in Nuremberg, and provide a way of evaluating these in relation to the socioeconomic profile of the city today. Providing an alternative appraisal of postwar city transformation, this diachronic research offers insight into Nuremberg’s under-researched past, which is also of interest to planners and policy makers seeking to improve future cities.